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One of CrossFit’s most-loathed movements, the burpee also represents a skill that can be transferred to other exercises, says gymnastics and movement guru Carl Paoli of San Francisco CrossFit.

“I go from flexion to extension to neutral to extension to flexion to neutral,” he explains. “It’s hard. And it goes back and forth, and it has so many moving pieces. That’s why the burpee is so hard.”

In a Gymnastics Trainer Course at Ascent CrossFit in Casper, Wyo., gymnastics guru Jeff Tucker talks about assessing athletes through simple movements. First, he has participants press PVC pipes over their heads and open their shoulders as much as they can.

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For those clients who don’t yet have upper-body strength, the ring row is a good scaling exercise for the pull-up, Julie Barnes Maurer says in this Gymnastics Trainer Course. Immediately putting them on the bar isn’t a good idea, much less having them kip, she emphasizes.

When performing the ring row, “really think about engaging your lats I don’t want all the stress to be on your elbow and your biceps,” Maurer says.

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.